Professor Aldo Donati, Director of the Arts Council and a leading citizen of our beloved city, who lost his life in a tragic accident on the day of the Festival, will be mourned, not only by his surviving brother and his friends, but by every student within the university, by his colleagues and associates, and by all the inhabitants of the Ruffano he loved so well. The eldest son of Aldo Donati, who for many years was Superintendent of the Ducal Palace, he was born and educated in the city. During the war he served in the Air Force and won his pilot’s wings. Shot down in 1943 he managed to escape, and during the German Occupation he formed a group of irregulars in the mountains and fought among his fellow partisans until the Liberation.
Returning to Ruffano, he learned of his father’s death sometime previously in an Allied prison camp, and his mother’s and younger brother’s presumed death by enemy bombing. Undaunted though bereaved, Aldo Donati studied at the university of Ruffano, and obtained an Honors Degree in Arts. He joined the Arts Council and devoted the remainder of his life to his work for the Council, for the preservation of the ducal palace and its treasures, and, last but not least, for the welfare of orphaned students. It was my privilege, as Rector of the university, to work with him on Festival productions, and I can only state, without any qualification whatsoever, that his ability in this field surpassed anything I had hitherto seen. He was brilliant, and his enthusiasm so inspired his actors and all who took part in Festival productions that they came to believe—and I speak from experience, my wife and I being among the participants until this year—that what they enacted was not fiction but reality.
Whether his choice for this year’s Festival production was wise or not need not be discussed here. The unhappy Duke Claudio is not one whose memory we wish to recall; the Ruffanesi of both yesterday and today prefer to forget him. He was an evil man with evil intentions, ill-disposed to all his people, admired only by a narrow circle of friends as ignoble as himself. He left behind him a legacy of hate. However this may be, Aldo Donati decided that he had a claim to fame, if only because of his Jehu feat of driving eighteen horses through the city of Ruffano, from the northern to the southern hill. Whether Duke Claudio actually achieved this feat is still uncertain. Aldo Donati did. The people who watched him do so on Friday morning will never forget the experience.
Had he stopped there, it would have sufficed. What he had achieved was fantastic, even sublime. But he aimed higher still, and lost his life in so aiming. The mechanism was not at fault. Experts have examined the apparatus. Aldo Donati seems to have ignored the elementary rule learned by every student parachutist—to pull the rip cord. Why he ignored it, we shall never know. His brother, Armino Donati, who returned to Ruffano last week after an absence of over twenty years and who will, we hope, remain with us to carry on the work with orphaned students, told me he believed that his brother, in midair, had a sudden vision, some sort of ecstasy blinding him to danger.
It may be true. Like Icarus, he flew too near the sun. Like Lucifer, he fell. We, the Ruffanesi who remain, salute the courage of a man who dared.
GASPARE BUTALI,
Rector, University of Ruffano.
Ruffano, Easter Week.